Measure Map was a web application that helped people get to know their blogs.

I can say without exaggeration that Measure Map was the best analytics tool for weblogs and that nothing has come close to matching its simplicity, elegance and effectiveness since.

Achieving that simplicity was a technical challenge. Ruby on Rails was relatively new still. Twitter wasn’t even having scaling issues yet. The word Ajax was still new when used in the context of web applications. There was no Heroku, no Amazon Web Services, nothing.

Behind the perfectly concise dashboard was a mountain of data that was being collected and displayed in real time. At a glance, you’d be able to know the four most important things about your blog. You could then click on more specific data points and get a more comprehensive view of what was happening.

I’m proud of the pioneering we did with Measure Map, and proud that Google bought the product. Sadly, Google turned off Measure Map. You can see a few hints of the original Measure Map in parts of Google Analytics (measuremap.com redirects there), but they tell nothing of how awesome the original web app was.